Life Without Principle

Henry David Thoreau

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Life without principle

AT A LYCEUM, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and
so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his
extremities and superficies. There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture. I would
have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was
when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens,
it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. Commonly, if men want anything of
me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land — since I am a surveyor — or, at most, what trivial news I
have burdened myself with. They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man once came a considerable
distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery; but on conversing with him, I found that he and his clique expected seven
eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one eighth mine; so I declined. I take it for granted, when I am invited
to lecture anywhere — for I have had a little experience in that business — that there is a desire to hear what I think
on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country — and not that I should say pleasant things merely,
or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They
have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all
precedent.

So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a
traveller, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I
will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the
locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It
is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for
dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my
wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or seared out of his wits by
the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for business! I think that there is nothing, not
even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall
under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he
wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to
board, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and
hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little
money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor
to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking any more than in many an
enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education
at a different school.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if
he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed
an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing
them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. For instance: just
after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed one of my neighbors walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a
heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of industry — his day’s work begun — his brow
commenced to sweat — a reproach to all sluggards and idlers — pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half
turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. And I thought, Such is the
labor which the American Congress exists to protect — honest, manly toil — honest as the day is long — that makes his
bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet — which all men respect and have consecrated; one of the sacred band, doing
the needful but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight reproach, because I observed this from a window, and was not
abroad and stirring about a similar business. The day went by, and at evening I passed the yard of another neighbor,
who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw
the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises, and
the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster’s labor, in my eyes. In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier
toil than this. I may add that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing
through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you
earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer
pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which
is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to
render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely.
Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of
wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that
kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do
my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my
employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. I once invented a rule for
measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish
to have their wood measured correctly — that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got
their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work;
and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel
that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a
man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame
would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were
the whole of a young man’s capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man,
to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure
hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this to pay me! As if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against
the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the underwriters
would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement
for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you
cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he
can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and
are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to
society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is
allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not
often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much
increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons
to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I
shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and
yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting
his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as
a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is
said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a
failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported
by the charity of friends, or a government pension — provided you continue to breathe — by whatever fine synonyms you
describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of
stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially,
they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their
backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important difference between two, that the one is
satisfied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and
unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. I should much
rather be the last man — though, as the Orientals say, “Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down;
and all those who are looking high are growing poor.”

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to
make getting a living not merely holiest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living
is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a
solitary individual’s musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it? The lesson
of value which money teaches, which the Author of the Universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to
skip altogether. As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even
reformers, so called — whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. I think that Society has done nothing for us in this
respect, or at least has undone what she has done. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods
which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how
to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle? Does Wisdom work in a tread-mill? or
does she teach how to succeed by her example? Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life? Is she merely the
miller who grinds the finest logic? It is pertinent to ask if Plato got his living in a better way or more successfully
than his contemporaries — or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like other men? Did he seem to prevail over
some of them merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it easier to live, because his aunt remembered
him in her will? The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the
real business of life — chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets,
so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so
get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is
called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of
getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The
hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the
wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it. Even Mahomet knew that God did not
make this world in jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see
mankind scramble for them. The world’s raffle! A subsistence in the domains of Nature a thing to be raffled for! What a
comment, what a satire, on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And
have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human
race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to
get our living, digging where we never planted — and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a
facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one
of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did not know that mankind was suffering for
want of old. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold
gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco.
What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is
the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me that you
worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The
humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus
obtained is not the same same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for
he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves
another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.

After reading Howitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening, I had in my mind’s eye, all night, the
numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen
feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water — the locality to which men furiously rush to
probe for their fortunes — uncertain where they shall break ground — not knowing but the gold is under their camp
itself — sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot —
turned into demons, and regardless of each others’ rights, in their thirst for riches — whole valleys, for thirty
miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them — standing in water,
and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and partly
forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of
the diggings still before me, I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest
particles — why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo
for you — what though it were a sulky-gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and
crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own
way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His
solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to
the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are
most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. Is not our native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from
the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down
the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for
this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor
to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions,
his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is
not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his
tom.

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in
Australia: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people,
called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had
found the nugget.’ At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.” I think, however,
there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, “He is a
hopelessly ruined man.” But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of the places
where they dig: “Jackass Flat”— “Sheep’s-Head Gully” — “Murderer’s Bar,” etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let
them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, I am thinking it will still be “Jackass Flat,” if not “Murderer’s
Bar,” where they live.

The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which
appears to be but in its infancy; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the
legislature of New Granada, regulating this kind of mining; and a correspondent of the “Tribune” writes: “In the dry
season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich guacas [that is,
graveyards] will be found.” To emigrants he says: “do not come before December; take the Isthmus route in preference to
the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets
will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required”: advice which might
have been taken from the “Burker’s Guide.” And he concludes with this line in Italics and small capitals: “If you are
doing well at home, STAY THERE,” which may fairly be interpreted to mean, “If you are getting a good living by robbing
graveyards at home, stay there.”

But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New England, bred at her own school and church.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing
the ways of men. Most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt
an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things — to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold
of it. The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was grovelling. The burden of it was — It is not worth your
while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you
sick, if you do — and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his
bread. If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels.
As we grow old, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our
finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more
unfortunate than ourselves.

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect
and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited
or not, in order to discover it. Why must we daub the heavens as well as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery
that Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was another. But it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly
that was the reason why the former went in search of the latter. There is not a popular magazine in this country that
would dare to print a child’s thought on important subjects without comment. It must be submitted to the D.D.‘s. I
would it were the chickadee-dees.

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all
the world.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.
Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock —
that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with
its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of the way
with your cobwebs; wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject
of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an
arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected
what I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the
greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written the lives of the deacons of their church.
Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which
I overheard one of my auditors put to another one — “What does he lecture for?” It made me quake in my shoes.

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell
in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our
houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the
lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with
the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are
manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the
brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not
habitually demand any more of each other.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was! — only another kind of politics
or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of
thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another,
and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the
tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. For all fruit of that stir we have the Kossuth
hat.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our
life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us
any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only
difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In
proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it,
that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not
heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to
me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You
cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. I did not know why my news should be so
trivial — considering what one’s dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we
hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition. You are often tempted to ask why such
stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had — that, after twenty-five years, you should meet Hobbins,
Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear
to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface
of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. We should wash ourselves clean of such
news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we
have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to
see the world blow up.

All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you
find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents. You
attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move
and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire — thinner than the paper on
which it is printed — then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane,
you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to
a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like
insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so
many men. It is individuals that populate the world. Any man thinking may say with the Spirit of Lodin —

“I look down from my height on nations,

And they become ashes before me —

Calm is my dwelling in the clouds;

Pleasant are the great fields of my rest.”

Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and biting each
other’s ears.

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the
details of some trivial affair — the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber
their minds with such rubbish — to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground
which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of
the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself — an hypaethral temple, consecrated to
the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I
hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is,
for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this
respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely
through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind’s inmost
apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us — the very street itself, with all its travel, its
bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide? When I
have been compelled to sit spectator and auditor in a court-room for some hours, and have seen my neighbors, who were
not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared to my
mind’s eye, that, when they took off their hats, their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between
which even their narrow heads were crowded. Like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad but shallow stream of
sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their coggy brains, passed out the other side. I wondered if, when
they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands and faces. It has seemed to me, at such a
time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar — if I may
presume him guilty before he is convicted — were all equally criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend
and consume them all together.

By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers
from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If
I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers.
There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the
profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both
communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe
that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall
be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were — its foundation broken into fragments
for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing
rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to
this treatment so long.

If we have thus desecrated ourselves — as who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate
ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and
ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as had as impurities. Even the facts of
science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile
by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the
streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might well
deliberate whether we had better know them — had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or
walk, over that bride of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest
shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement — but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil? — to
acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell,
with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut burs which contain abortive nuts,
perfect only to prick the fingers?

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a
merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he
is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic — the respublica — has been settled, it is
time to look after the resprivata — the private state — to see, as the Roman senate charged its consuls, “ne quid res
PRIVATA detrimenti caperet,” that the private state receive no detriment.

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King
Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means
to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of
politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be
really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without
representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies
on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter’s substance.

With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan — mere Jonathans.
We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of
truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and
agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.

So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important
question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance — the English question why did I not say? Their
natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breeding” respects only secondary objects. The finest manners in
the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of
past days — mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. It is the vice, but not the excellence of
manners, that they are continually being deserted by the character; they are cast-off-clothes or shells, claiming the
respect which belonged to the living creature. You are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no
excuse generally, that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts his
manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see
himself. It was not in this sense that the poet Decker called Christ “the first true gentleman that ever breathed.” I
repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about
Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions
which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.

Government and legislation! these I thought were respectable professions. We have heard of heaven-born Numas,
Lycurguses, and Solons, in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal legislators; but think of
legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco! What have divine legislators to do with
the exportation or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to submit
the question to any son of God — and has He no children in the Nineteenth Century? is it a family which is extinct? —
in what condition would you get it again? What shall a State like Virginia say for itself at the last day, in which
these have been the principal, the staple productions? What ground is there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my
facts from statistical tables which the States themselves have published.

A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I
saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper berries, and
bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between
Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World
for her bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such,
to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are
so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity — the
activity of flies about a molasses — hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I,
if men were mosquitoes.

Lieutenant Herndon, whom our government sent to explore the Amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery,
observed that there was wanting there “an industrious and active population, who know what the comforts of life are,
and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country.” But what are the “artificial wants” to
be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice
and granite and other material wealth of our native New England; nor are “the great resources of a country” that
fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these. The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high
and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out “the great resources” of Nature, and at last taxes her
beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her. When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more
than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production,
is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men — those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and
redeemers.

In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of
truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly
recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics
or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some
extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. I have
not got to answer for having read a single President’s Message. A strange age of the world this, when empires,
kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man’s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take
up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with
me, the reader, to vote for it — more importunate than an Italian beggar; and if I have a mind to look at its
certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant’s clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot
speak a word of English itself, I shall probably read of the eruption of some Vesuvius, or the overflowing of some Po,
true or forged, which brought it into this condition. I do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the
almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence, as I do commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his
popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is
reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, government will go down on
its knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days.

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital
functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical
body. They are infrahuman, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me,
as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it
is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it
were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves —
sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a
confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether
a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of,
certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but
sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand,
surely.

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